Google Summer of Code 2014

The program is already running for a while and all the students met with everyone and got familiar to our projects. Official code work started today already.

Everyone’s invited to feedback and monitor student’s progress on the SoC list: https://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/soc-2014-dev
We will take special attention to coupling students with the stakeholder users!
Below are the summaries of the projects:

A lot of computer graphics objects have an undesirable topology. Many artists require changing the topology of the mesh to facilitate the process of editing and animation. In recent years, the most popular mesh topology is composed of triangles and quadrilaterals that provide several desired features by the artists. This project proposes an interactive remeshing tool that generate a quad-dominant mesh based on harmonic functions.

Blender will have a better fluid and smoke simulation solver base. Turbulence simulations will be much improved by vortex handling and wavelet turbulence support. Users will have a better control over the fluid and smoke simulation. Current Blender version allow for only one fluid domain to be present in one scene. Though it may provide control over computation resources by moving/resizing the domain, it is not always convenient. Having MantaFlow as framework allows for multiple domains. Also, problems with zero gravity in current Blender versions are solved in MantaFLow.

Thomas Dinges – Cycles Optimizations

Mentor: Sergey Sharybin

I plan to improve the Cycles renderer, by improving its performance and memory usage. The items are from the official Optimization Ideas list, written by Brecht here.

Jason Wikins – Viewport FX IIIMentor: Antony Riakiotakis

This is a proposal to complete previous work on updating Blender”s viewport drawing code. Due to previous work, the Viewport FX branch of Blender no longer depends on legacy versions of OpenGL, additionally it can run on mobile systems using OpenGL ES. A large part of what remains to be done are optimization and testing. Optimization will involve finding the worst bottlenecks that diminish drawing performance and mitigating them. Since almost all drawing code in Blender has been modified by previous work, there is a potential for new visual errors to appear from previously working code, so testing has to be done. Both optimization and testing would be enhanced by involving the Blender community. Additionally, a replacement for the deprecated OpenGL selection mode needs to be implemented to accelerate picking objects in the viewport.

Inez Almeida – BGE – Cleanup & SupportMentor: Daniel Stokes

This proposal targets some of the currently identified problems with Blender”s Game Engine. These issues include a high number of unsolved bugs, bad consistency of the user and python interface, lack of support and maintenance and poor performance for now-a-days standards. All these were acknowledged in Blender”s 2.7/2.8 roadmap, along with plans for better integration of the GE as an interactive mode.

Jonathan deWerd – NURBS ModernizationMentor: Sergey Sharybin

I propose to revive a longstanding effort to improve NURBS support in blender with two broad goals: one, attaining import/export compatibility for common NURBS-based CAD and modeling formats, and two, adding industry- standard NURBS manipulation tools so that blender can actively participate in workflows containing NURBS primitives.

An update for the Shape Keys panel GUI for more productive and powerful relative shape key editing workflow to facilitate shape key-based facial rigging & under-the-hood changes to support the new GUI.

I get excited glancing at this lineup! Seriously-exciting Google Summer of Code for Blender! Easily the most revolutionizing one yet! I especially look forward to the Interactive Quadrilateral Remeshing and NURBS Modernization–two features I’ve longed to see for years! Good luck to all, and hopefully, may we see ALL these great ideas achieved!

WOOw, great new features and improvementes are comming!! All the projects are great. I would love to hear more about the Fluid simulation MantaFlow integration and the nurbs modernization. The industrial designers uses it a lot. Cylces improvements: always welcome. Thanks in advance for all the coders and mentors!

I am pleased that there is so much thoughtful consideration, not only to addressing past and present performance and utility issues, But a long term forward view of Blender as a tool for more creativity. Bravo, to those participation in this year’s summer of code, It seems well planned and organized! I can’t wait to try out the results…Thanx again.

The units of measure is not very accurate. A correctly proprotioned character standing at six-feet tall is not going to be 23feet wide from finger tip to finger tip. Please fix the measurements system.